Higher capacitance, lower leakage dielectric layers for capacitor dielectric and transistor gate applications are needed for scaling down device dimensions to realize a higher density memory. An approach to increasing the capacitance is to increase the dielectric constant of the capacitor dielectric. Although metal oxide dielectric films, such as HfO2, have higher dielectric constants compared to SiO2 and Al2O3, such metal oxide dielectrics typically exhibit higher leakage current. In order to reduce this leakage current to acceptable levels for these films, these metal oxide films are formed as thicker dielectric films. Forming the thicker metal oxide dielectric in turn reduces the capacitance of the structure. Additionally, the thermal stability of some metal oxides may be poor, presumably due to crystallization at higher temperature, where the crystallization temperature decreases with increased film thickness.